Exploring The Fashion World In 2026

AI brings opportunities

With turbulent conditions, including volatile input costs, supply chain disruptions, and slow growth, straining fashion’s economic model, AI is shifting from a competitive edge to a business necessity. Companies are reshaping workforces accordingly, with some existing jobs becoming more AI-centric, enabling roles to shift toward higher-value creative and analytical tasks.

Global fashion and luxury players have made progress deploying automation with generative AI in select functions for routine tasks. More than 35 percent of executives report already using it in areas such as online customer service, image creation, copywriting, consumer search, or product discovery. While finance and manufacturing roles will see the greatest overall impact from automation without gen AI, automation with gen AI could lead to huge productivity gains for fashion players in their marketing and sales functions. We strive to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to our website. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you. Please email us at: McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.com

To harness this technological change, companies must redesign their processes and compete for AI talent, looking beyond the fashion ecosystem to find it while protecting the essential creativity that makes fashion tick. Business leaders will need to shift their focus from small pilots and experiments that can only deliver incremental change toward a more fundamental reassessment of how their organizations work. And while still nascent, agentic AI is reshaping how people work and collaborate, so fashion companies will need to figure out how they can harness this emerging technology, too.

AI is also transforming how people shop. Customers are turning to large language models to search for products, compare offerings, and receive tailored recommendations. Some are even using agents as style and wardrobe consultants (these agents give advice on what to buy and where to buy it). These shifts make AI chatbot responses the new SEO.

These dynamics will only grow more pronounced as agentic commerce accelerates in the second half of the decade.